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 Posted: Sat Sep 28, 2013 9:50 pm
I: Arrival
Asclpeius and the statue of her past self: 1462
The bales of newspaper were still packed. So was Marcella's first aid bag, with the flashlights. But she would be needing a bigger backpack for what she was planning now. Fortunately, she had been able to leave some of the things in her personal headquarters until the time was ripe for the camping trip.
The smaller bag went into the larger one, along with several water bottles, and three packed meals. A change of clothing was fortunately unnecessary, since Marcella would be wearing her seifuku the whole time; this saved a considerable amount of space. She also left out the usual hiker's signal whistles and compass, as they would be useless to someone alone on an asteroid. A matchbook came with her, as well, for the braziers, and a pair of fireplace logs she had gotten on sale in the middle of the summer. She also packed a pad of paper and a pencil, just in case. Marcella's sleeping bag fit under the backpack, held in place with two straps. This left a bit of space in the main pocket of the bag. Marcella started to pack her pillow, but decided a moment later to grab her old plush golden retriever from middle school instead. The dog had remained in her bed since she had bought him, but had taken up more of a role as an auxiliary pillow rather than any sort of imaginary friend or companion. But he still sprang to mind when she thought of spending the night on her distant asteroid. Rover's face, stitched in a grin, rested against Marcella's shoulder when she put the backpack on to test the weight; the zipper held him in, but his head poked out of the backpack.
All the water made it heavy, but then she could unpack when she arrived on Asclepius. Same with the newspaper. All that was left now was henshining up, dialing her passage, and going.
The other Palomos thought she was departing for an overnight camping trip, and that a friend was picking her up while they were gone. She considered again that it might be foolish to go for so long by herself, but on the other hand ... well, it was not like there was anyone else on Asclepius. More dangerous things in the woods, most likely.
She hoped.
Laden with bags, Asclepius stood in the center of her rented room and took out her senshi phone. She flipped it open and dialed for the trip. She thought of the great hall, and how she had never seen the full size of it in the blackness of its interior. Perhaps the hazel-eyed senshi could direct herself to that room in particular somehow if she thought of it hard enough when she pressed the "send" button....
...
Taking the baggage to space was about as tiring as taking another person. Asclepius had forgotten just how much of her energy it drained to make the trip, but she found herself in slightly reassuring darkness nonetheless. Instinctively, she heard her mother's voice chastizing her to pack lighter, but then considering she had come from Earth up to space, she had to wonder just how much difference in effort leaving, say, Rover at home would have really made.
The Senshi of Medicine sank to her knees to rest a moment as the blackness pressed in around her, silent save for her own breathing and the distant sighs of machinery elsewhere in the hospital asteroid. Gradually, she was getting used to being here, and it did not scare her anywhere near as badly as her first visit.
Light was still most welcome, though; Asclepius unzipped her backpack and reached past the familiar worn fur of Rover to retrieve a flashlight. She switched it on and nearly jumped as the light reflected back at her from a brass brazier about a foot in front of her.
It saved her the trouble of having to hunt one down, at least. And it meant that Asclepius was probably in the great hall. At least the girl had yet to find another room in the place that had similar braziers.
She stood, and started pulling out newspapers from her bundle, tossing them into the cold metal bowl, first with one hand, then with both. Once she had a good wad of paper in there, Asclepius added one of the logs, then struck a match and tossed it in after. A faint orange glow started promptly, then grew, pushing a dome of light outwards towards the walls of the room, however far-off they were.
Within a few moments, Asclepius could see both sides of the room for the first time - smooth marble, with two tall doors on each side. They were framed with pillars, carved with snakes coiled around them. And the shadows of the other brass braziers danced along the walls in the firelight. Down a little ways off, at the head of the room, Asclepius could see the shadowed alcove where the carved likeness of her previous incarnation seemed to step out of the stone.
Switching off the flashlight but taking it with her anyway, the girl walked down to the end to get a better look at him. Her heels echoed around the room softly, though the hall seemed smaller now that she could see its boundaries. Slightly smaller.
The statue of the man was elegant in its incompleteness, as though the carver knew that it would be left unfinished, and had touched up some edges to give the appearance of the past senshi walking out of the wall. He was white as the rest of the walls, his flesh and robes polished but not to a shine. His left foot, placed slightly forward of the right, was smooth, the detail of the toenails lost, though, as though thousands of hands had touched it in asking or in gratitude.
The flickering light of the newspaper pyre caught a glint of a metallic crown on the bearded man's head. Asclepius had not noticed it before, likely between the darkness, and that it was made of slender wires. She sized up the statue, placing one hand on his foot for a moment, as she tried to figure out if she could pull herself up it to get a better look at the circlet. But the stone man did not provide terribly many handholds, and the brown-haired girl felt awkward after considering it for a moment, like she were impinging on the personal space of a living man.
So she stepped back, appraising the figure from a distance for a moment.
And then she thought she caught motion from the corner of her eye.
Gooseflesh raced up her arms and she shivered, immediately turning her head to follow it. No one was there, of course. But whatever it was had still beckoned for her attention. This had been her major aprehension about coming here for an extended stay - not even the bodies, since the Senshi of Medicine was fairly certain they were dead, but rather the whatever-it-was beckoning eerily out of the corner of her eye. Somehow she just had this nagging feeling like she was not alone whenever she was here, brought on not just by the apparitions of motion just out of her range of sight, but ... it was just a feeling. Not even necessarily one that was malicious or malevolent, but one that felt ancient. It had seen the men in the hallways die and it knew how and why; it knew all of whatever sad tale had brought about the end of operations on the hospital asteroid.
Asclepius crossed her arms, rubbing the skin lightly with her palms to banish the goosebumps and calm herself. The statue of the man stood serenely above her, and the great hall felt quiet. Somehow he provided some degree of comfort, at least. The girl decided this room would likely be the best place to sleep for the night. In the meanwhile, she could attempt to explore a few more rooms. There were two doors, one on either side of the statue; Asclepius knew halls of glowing blue mushrooms stretched beyond the larger of the doors, but the other smaller door she had not yet entered.
It seemed like a good place to start today.
With some reluctance, she turned her back on the statue for the moment, and returned to the lit brazier where she had left her belongings upon arrival on the planet. Her heeled footsteps echoed through the hall as she moved her supplies to the span of floor before the feet of the stone man. When she did sleep, Asclepius thought she would feel safest and most at ease under the eternal watch of her past self.
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Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 9:27 pm
II: Flesh and StoneAsclepius and the old world: 1587Asclepius half-expected the door to squeak like the stereotypical haunted house door, but it moved with little more than a quiet scraping. The flickering firelight behind the senshi cast her shadow down onto a light coating of dust on the floor, marred in an arc where the opening door had traced a path through it. There was no glow of mushrooms to illuminate this narrow hallway, and so she switched on her camping lantern, holding it up to see as far as she could.
The hall was not long, and, unlike the ones that led into the great hall she was about to leave behind, it extended straight ahead before ending in another closed door. The door at the end of the hall was visibly more ornate than the one the Senshi of Medicine passed through now, but the distance kept her from picking up the details. The air smelled different down this way, as well, she observed as she stepped into the narrower space. Or perhaps it was not a smell, but some other sort of feeling. Some tangible feeling...
He caught waving out of the corner of his eye and gave a mild sigh of exasperation as he turned to see what now. He thought everyone was done with him for the afternoon, and he could finally have a chance to get some work done in his office. Everyone had needed him today, it seemed, and he was really just wishing now for some time undisturbed.
To his pleasant surprise and infinite relief, the one who had beckoned this time had done so with clawed hands. The white guardian cat smiled in his demi-human form as he approached, mismatched eyes half-closed. He signed a greeting, having not seen the senshi in some weeks. The man reciprocated the greeting, then gestured for the cat to follow.
Asclepius put her hand against the wall, head reeling at the brief onslaught of images. She was facing one direction, then back, then forward again. It took more than a few moments to get her bearings. So that was what the supposed visions were like. Had she been having them all along, then? Had the motions at the edges of her vision been sights into the past? People ... trying to get the attention of the man who had been Asclepius in the past?
Once she felt steady on her feet again, she continued down the hallway, until she reached the door. It was engraved with small figures of people, decorated with pale paint that was chipping and peeling away. The dust just in front of the door turned multicolored, betraying that had been flaking for quite some time. Asclepius held her lantern aloft, leaning close but not touching the door as she studied the figures. There were people, women and bearded men, in flowing sleeveless robes and veils, performing various tasks. The majority of it looked like medical practice, in a medieval sort of way - she winced slightly at one relief depicting two women conducting an amputation. But, as she worked her way down the pictorial list of apparent activities of Asclepian daily life, they came to include alien analogs to farming as well. Children appeared among the figures tending to a variety of plants the Earth-born senshi could not identify, ranging from the large mushrooms she had already discovered (touched with pale blue paint under the caps, to represent the glow, perhaps) to tall slender stalks like giant asparagus, planters of what looked like tiny dead bonsai, and vines of fern-like leaves.
As she finished skimming down the images, Asclepius took out her senshi phone, flipping it open and selecting the camera. It took a few moments of waving the lantern around in one hand to get the light to look decent, but then she proceeded to photograph the carvings. The detail was incredible to her, and she suddenly understood those who felt the need to post internet photos of everything. These, of course, would not be hitting the web, but she was excited at the idea of sharing these images with her senshi friends who understood what it was like to rule over an ancient dead world they knew next to nothing about.
Once the brown-haired girl felt the carvings had been thoroughly documented in photos, she snapped the phone shut, and reached out, hesitantly placing her hand against the door. The stone was cool but not cold, and Asclepius felt chips of paint stick to her palm as soon as she touched it. Then she pushed. The door swung slowly and smoothly inwards with a quiet scraping sound of stone on stone.
He stepped into the office and brushed his hand over the small panel on the wall just beside the door inside. Soft glowing lights came on to illuminate the room, some white, some touched with shades of blue and orange. The white cat followed him in. A stack of pages awaited his attention on the desk in the center of the room, but he ignored them for now in favor of company. He walked to his favorite chair in the back corner, gesturing as he sat to its twin opposite it across a small round wooden table. Then he loosened the laces on his sandals before removing them, then sat back and sighed, enjoying the feeling of plush carpeting on his bare toes. His feline friend, who did not wear shoes to begin with, stretched luxuriously before taking a seat him self.
A model sat on the small ornate table between the chairs. It was a miniature version of one of the ambulance ships that the Asclepians piloted, slender and pale grey. He knew they were designed to be modular, all of them the same with replaceable parts, for ease of maintenance. He had worked on them when he was younger, and had dreamt at one point of being one of the pilots, but a severe illness in his childhood had damaged his hearing, and he had been told that he would not pass the pilot tests as a result. Once upon a time, he had stubbornly studied flight manuals and dogged the pilots with questions, intent on proving his ability as a pilot anyway. But then the cat had come, and awakened him as Sailor Asclepius, and his education promptly shifted for this new role.
His name was Evagrius. He had never planned to be a leader, but here he was, with the cozy chair in the office off of the great hall. His role as administrator was largely symbolic, as the caste of bureaucrats were always better prepared to handle the affairs of the asteroid, but he still had paperwork to complete. More often, he was a diplomat, both to his own people and to other worlds. Evagrius could walk through the halls and his mere presence reassured the sick. True, he now had the medical skill to provide true treatment, and moreover, his magical ability as a senshi permitted near miracles on occasion, but the rest of the Asclepius kept him elevated in his own special position here, such that he was nearly a walking legend.
It was at once both exciting and lonely.
Sometimes Evagrius wished that he could go back to being the ambulance mechanic, fading into the crowd of many in the docks, and able to speak freely. Or, speak freely with his hands alongside his words, and hope that whatever friends he had could understand him as well as his guardian cat did.
At times, though he was pleased to just sit back and rest. He knew the cat with him was his dear friend because they could sit like this, without conversation, enjoying each others' quiet company. And remembering this made the drastic change he had undergone as a young man, from repair boy to physician and figurehead, something that Evagrius never regretted for a second.
The vision ceased, and the Asclepius of the present snapped back to reality, finding herself seated in a musty-smelling chair in a room dimly-lit only by her lamp, left on the floor near the doorway. The desk between where she sat and the light cast a shadow upwards into her eyes.
She blinked, then rubbed her nose and coughed, then sneezed - the chair released dust as she stood from it, and she stepped away. Wondering if the lights this room had apparently once had still worked, she set the doorway as a destination away from the dusty chair, moving around the desk as she did so--
And stopped abruptly.
Slumped against the side of the desk was another body. This one wore tattered white garments, though the low light hid the colors of any detail work they might have had. His head still bore scraggly black curls, their shine lost to death; a beard also graced his chin where it rested against his visible sternum. And adorning the curls on his head was a slender golden circlet with spines pointing upwards....
Asclepius felt a thousand things at once, each of them impossible to express. This was her, her past self, seated dead on the floor, in his office. Anguish and empathy far overruled the fear. She was like a lit candle surveying the long-extinguished one that had lit her flame. There was anger in her, too - not even a proper burial to allow this man his eternal sleep?
Hands to her mouth, she stumbled for the door, letting out a mournful cry.
"Oh God, oh God, oh God."
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Posted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 2:38 pm
III: The Fields of AsclepiusAsclepius and the mushrooms: 1331The rest of the asteroid suddenly seemed like a fascinating area to explore. Everything except the office and the other rooms near it. Asclepius had left the man alone - Evagrius, she had learned - where he sat in his eternal sleep, partly out of a natural fear and aversion to corpses, and partly because it just hurt her heart, physically, to see him there.
Still shaking a little, she ventured into the gently spiraling corridor of glowing mushrooms again, having cracked open one of her bottles of water for something to calm herself down. The lantern was with her, too, but she left it off for the moment, instead choosing to pick her way carefully down the fractured cobbles among the mushrooms, with only their pale blue glow for light.
The last time she had been in this hall, ********* had eaten one of the mushrooms and reacted poorly. The Senshi of Medicine had not really had a chance to see where the hall lead in either direction. She and the cat and the chibi senshi with her at the time had started to head upwards, but not gone far. The hall also extended down; Asclepius' curiosity took her in this direction, even as she wrapped her arms around herself and tried not to continue crying.
All the people here... Evagrius' was not the only body that remained. The whole world had died, seemingly at the same time. Knowing that they were all her own people - or would have been, a thousand years in the past - left the girl unafraid of their lingering ghosts, but at the same time, it was hard not to let their deaths weigh on her heart. The sense of responsibility in her was too strong not to consider it.
Asclepius tried to remind herself, sobbing as she followed the gently sloping ramp downwards among the alien fungus of her planet, that everyone had died centuries before, and she had no way of bringing any of them back. Maybe the visions had blurred her identity with that of the past senshi, the bearded man standing in silent stone in the wall, and this was how he had felt as well.
... So maybe she was not a bad successor? Or so she hoped.
Biting back tears, she raised her chin and kept walking. She would follow this corridor to the bottom, see where it went, then return to the great hall and have a meal in the shadow of her past self. Perhaps being near the statue would give her some idea where to go after that, since she planned to be here for more than a few more hours. Or, more importantly, give her the confidence and steel in her heart to venture back into that office and search for more clues. Clues to who Evagrius was and ... what had all gone wrong. If there was some sort of cycle trying to repeat itself, Asclepius wanted to make absolutely sure that it did not have the same apparent outcome as the last.
As the path twisted downwards, a brighter, whiter glow began to fill it, until Asclepius emerged into another large chamber. By her guess, it was directly below the great hall, except in lieu of austere darkness and the brass braziers, it glowed in a myriad of colors with countless mushrooms. She could see the tall caps of the blue ones she had been walking among for the last several minutes, but they were mixed in with bunches of others: tall club-shaped ones; shorter ones sporting narrow cones; ones that looked like tattered parasols; others that looked like lumpy fuzzy rocks. All of them shone in pale tones of various colors, which collectively filled the room with a variegated hazy glow.
The brown-haired girl slowed as she stepped through the doorway and into the hall, mouth hanging open at the sight. The feel of the air changed as she entered, taking on a slightly cooler and damper feel, while the smell took on an edge of wet earth. Tendrils at her feet bore little rubbery pods that illuminated her path - it ran straight ahead, so far as she could tell, to the distant opposite side of the hall, but the mushrooms encroached on and overgrew the path.
It had not always been that way.
Evagrius surveyed the farmers' hall, with its careful rows full of the various cultivated fungus of the hospital planet. Segregated by species, each row had its own single color, making it easy to for him to get his bearings in spite of the fact that he was not overly familiar with agriculture. Along wall to the side, there was a curtain to separate off a few of the other varieties that gave off abundant airborne spores....
Although time had unceremoniously torn down the barrier; it hung in tatters from the ceiling, while the species it had sought to keep separate new grew cheerfully in shelf forms all over the walls of the room.
A few tools lay scattered on the ground, Asclepius discovered when she tripped noisily over a rusted machete. The shape of it matched what she could recall from the carvings upstairs. And, she realized as she continued across the hall, that some of what she had mistaken for tools in the facade were actually other types of mushrooms.
It was sort of comforting, that at least the fungus grew abundantly here, even now. The world was not totally devoid of life. Great care and a willing workforce could tame the room back into a farm as Asclepius saw it in her mind's eye as the visions came and went. All of these varieties had different uses, too, and she only wished that the past would reveal more of that to her. Could she perhaps skip food entirely on her next visit, and instead just eat the mushrooms that had sustained her past self, and all of his fellow Asclepians? Or was he not entirely human, and the fungi only adapted for whatever alien biology had lived here in the past?
Either way, the room was just beautiful. The chaos of the mushrooms overgrown their neat rows and plots gave off a comforting light, and Asclepius felt like she was discovering more species the longer she walked. Now sunless plants, too, or at least sturdier things that seemed to bear bark instead of the rubbery texture of the mushrooms. Here, woody vines snaked along the floor; there grew clusters of reed-like grasses in the pale light of a few mushrooms. In a few places, things that looked like trees with corroding metal bark grew like dead twisted bonsai, no higher than Asclepius' knees.
And as she approached the opposite side of the grand hall of glowing flora, she could see a doorway that led to another room filled with light. Who knew how many other rooms full of growing things there were!
A small urge in her wanted to explore further, but Asclepius also did not want to get lost. She had left all her camping supplies up in the hall above, and she did not want to venture too far from them. Not that she feared starving to death out lost in space - after all, she could always just dial her senshi phone to take her back home from where ever she happened to be within the hollowed stone world. But the Senshi of Medicine had already made the careful preparations to stay up here for a night. It would have been a waste if she could not take advantage of the time she had bought herself away from home.
Still, though, she could continue on straight ahead, she supposed as she had done across this first room. In spite of the ages of neglect, the mushrooms' original rows were still visible, so that she could follow a furrow between them, overgrown as it was, in more or less a straight line....
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Posted: Sun Nov 17, 2013 9:50 pm
IV: Dining With GhostsAsclepius feasts vicariously: 764Evagrius sat at the head of the table, with perhaps a dozen or so of the elder administrators and higher-ranking physicians. Phanaeus the cat sat at his right side. He had been through these functions dozens of times in the past, but it still made the senshi feel a bit strange to be the youngest person at the table. The youngest physician there still had greying hair, and Phanaeus ... well, no one could be sure how old the Mauvian was.
He could hear them chat with each other, like a low hum that sometimes blended with the vibrations of the various atmospheric functions of the asteroid around them. No one would discuss business until after the meal, though, as much out of tradition as for Evagrius' sake. Occasionally the record keeper who held the seat nearest him and opposite the white cat would touch Evagrius' shoulder lightly to attract his attention, in order to ask about his most recent trip abroad; he assured her that it had been boring, save for picking up Phanaeus on the way home.
The pilot had allowed Evagrius to drive the fast, sleek Asclepian craft for part of the return trip, as well, to his pleasure. It was not the first time he had done so, but it never failed to please him. He neglected to mention this detail to the inquiring historian, though, just because his amusements did not seem worth of discussion. Some of the others close to Evagrius - including a handful of the other dinner guests - had chided him for being so distant in the past, but the man maintained that it was not necessary for any of them to love him. He had not had to earn his position as a senshi, but rather had been born with it and later had the light awakened in him. He was content to let his actions speak for him, and remain a steadfast, if stony, figurehead.
All the Asclepians believed that Evagrius' selection was all that was required to demonstrate his fitness to be a leader as a senshi.
The others who had rose to their positions through hard work deferred to him, but he allowed them freedom enough in their work. And, in truth, he wanted their questions, their advice, and, on occasion, their small talk. It had never been his place to interfere with those who knew the asteroid's workings inside and out, but again, in interest of being the figurehead, the man kept track of their tasks and reports.
Some of the physician students in training came into the hall to take plates from the table as everyone finished eating. Mugs of warm wine replaced the dishes, and Evagrius sat back in his chair while the others prepared to discuss their business.
Much of the talk was for the visiting cat, and the senshi only needed to offer assistance interpreting one way or the other. Phanaeus had more leeway socially, being non-human and non-Asclepian, and made his boredom and frustration progressively more obvious. The executives had their concerns about troubles with Earth, and naturally thought that the Mauvian had more information than he did; poor Phanaeus seemed a bit aggravated that he could not give more answers in his infinite space feline wisdom, and his tail flicked back and forth as he dealt with the same slew of questions that Evagrius himself had faced upon his return from his trip.
Asclepius himself received some questions, as well, namely about what he had observed during the trip abroad, and the state of the Knights, and so forth. And they also inquired about the latest news from the Surrounding....
Asclepius in the present snapped out of the vision abruptly, and blinked, staring down at the empty ziplock bags laid out on the floor around her. She had apparently eaten her whole packed supper while hallucinating about the past, and had not tasted a bite of it. Attempts at recalling the taste of the meal in her past life were fruitless, as well; the memories faded like smoke, like when she tried to remember bits of a dream.
Still, though, the visions were welcome, especially since they were not creepy. The girl had been here so many times, and seen next to nothing. Perhaps... her past self had been slow to trust, and somehow his ghost had been reluctant to show his life to her.
"In that case, I'm glad you've found me worthy," she said aloud, twisting around to look up at the statue looming above where she had sat for her meal.
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Posted: Sun Dec 01, 2013 10:12 pm
V: Tools of the TradeAsclepius discovers an artifact: 1429The next morning - or close enough to it - Marcella awoke on her asteroid. She had eventually powered down to sleep, fortunately neither immediately dying nor reverting back to her earthly point of departure upon doing so. The air had seemed a bit thinner, but she had survived the night. At some point, the fire in the brazier had died out, leaving her in the utter darkness of the great hall, but she managed to find one of her camping lanterns without much fumbling around.
She switched it on and sat up, rubbing one eye with the heel of her hand, then grabbed her henshin pen to power up once more. The previous night had been dreamless, though the hazel-eyed girl could not say whether it was because she could not have visions while being her normal human self, or if she had just been too tired. Or if the hallucinations of the past could only happen while awake.
Turning to face the statue of Evagrius, she stretched. Really, she supposed, it might be just up to him what she saw or did not see.
Breakfast consisted of a granola bar and trail mix, and then Asclepius set off to explore again. She gathered up her supplies, intending to carry them with her so she could just phone home whenever she decided to leave. That way she would not have to worry about retracing her steps anywhere.
Really, she wanted to go anywhere else than back into a room with another body in it, but the brown-haired girl found herself heading back to the intricately-carved door that lead to Evagrius' resting place. She did want to do something for him to lay him to proper rest somehow, but Asclepius was still not sure what. So far the only soil she knew of had mushrooms growing in it, and somehow leaving the towering fungi to reclaim his body seemed unfitting. On the other hand, she did not exactly have any sarcophagi handy in which to inter him. And the statue, if it was meant to hold his remains in any way, was unfinished; Asclepius had not found any places, visible or hidden, that might have been able to hold a skeleton or an urn.
But part of her still felt like ... he might feel lonely. Somehow. She kind of just wanted to see him again.
Asclepius was capable of empathy, certainly, but she still found herself a bit weirded out by the way her mind wanted to bestow the man's ghost with such human characteristics. Or rather his body, since she was not given to believing in spirits and the supernatural. Even though she had definitely experienced visions of a past life the day before.
Senshi just really did not have the room to be skeptics.
Shaking her head, the Senshi of Medicine returned to the old office, holding her camping lantern aloft, then setting it down on the desk. Papers littered the surface, crumbling pages written and printed in some alien language. She tried to avoid placing the light directly on any of them, then in the bright light, leaned down to study the writing more closely. No vision manifested to tell her what they said, though, or even to hint at the meaning.
Asclepius moved to one side of the table, closer to where Evagrius' bones rested in silence, still scanning over the documents for anything that seemed familiar. There was also a metal-tipped wooden stylus stuck with ink to a piece of paper, and the inkwell it had come from nearby, with black flakes crusted around the edges. A metal candle-holder with a candle in it, and a few other candles outside it and melted to the table. A plain metal cup with reddish-brown staining inside. Blank pages mingled with the filled ones, all yellowed and crumbling at the edges. One page under several others that Asclepius was afraid to touch appeared to have a drawing of a mushroom on it.
All the language had been intelligible to her while hallucinating in the visions. Well, as well as Evagrius himself had been able to hear it. It had all come across to Asclepius as naturally as English or Spanish did to her in her present life. For now, all the could do was shrug and snap a few pictures on her senshi phone of the pages. If nothing else, she might be able to ask other senshi if the writing looked familiar, as though the planets had shared a writing system, or if it was different between worlds.
And then she came to the silent bowed head of Evagrius again, with the simple gold circlet nestled in fragile, ancient hair. He was like the mummies in the museum, both in overt appearance, and her inability to stop staring in spite of how much he creeped her out. But knowing who he was - her, from the past, not just some king she could never know - offered some degree of comfort.
"I will find a way to lay you to rest properly," she assured him in a whisper that awkwardly seemed to fill the room regardless.
Skirting around him by a wide margin, she made her way back to the chair she had visited the previous day, crouching at the table beside it. There was a model there, which she recognized both from the visions and memories and from her own experiences from a prior visit as one of the ambulance ships of Asclepius. It was still in relatively good shape, beneath a light coating of dust. The small table also had a drawer in the front, which the hazel-eyed girl pulled out slowly after a moment. She turned on another flashlight to look inside, and found within a stack of letters, bound with string. More of the alien writing covered the topmost page, and Asclepius started to reach for it to pull it out, but stopped short of touching it. Maybe it was best if she left everything as it was in here for now, and returned later with some methods to preserve the writing for later. All of the aged paper looked so fragile....
She snapped another photo of the table, drawer open, with the model atop it, and then slid the drawer shut. Standing she turned around, scanning the rest of the room in the light from the lantern. Shelves of books, primarily, which Asclepius also elected to leave alone for today, though she wondered if there was anyone alive today who had a shot at reading the Asclepian writing. There was a chair for the desk, and another chair that matched the one beside the table on the opposite side of the room, but otherwise the office was fairly simple. No decorations on the walls, or any other sculpture.
Asclepius took one more photo of the layout of the room, though from an angle that left Evagrius out of the shot. It seemed weird to take photos of him, and so she did not bother. Still, she walked around to the opposite side of the desk again to see him once more before setting out from the office to find another room to explore.
Just as she was starting to reach for the light where she had left it on the desk, a motion caught her attention at the corner of her eye, and Asclepius gasped slightly in surprise. Even knowing that it was probably some benevolent ghost - or vision - it still creeped her out, because she knew she was the only living thing on the asteroid.
Well, mushrooms aside.
Instinctively, she withdrew, leaving the lamp on the desk, and looked back down to Evagrius. One of his arms was folded across his stomach, one leg drawn up near his chest. The other arm hung at his side, a bit disjointedly from centuries of decay. But his fingers remained in a position almost like he was pointing. Asclepius frowned, her gaze following his index finger out in a straight line....
There on the floor, near the bookshelf on the wall, was what looked like a clay vase of some sort. It was decorated with figures that Asclepius could not quite make out in the low light near the floor, and trailed a short chain. She crouched to lift it carefully by the chain and held it up in the light.
This felt important. She felt like she should take it with her. If Evagrius' ghost was actually here somehow ... she felt like he wanted her to have it.
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